The thousand-petalled lotus, where every particular becomes all

The six wheels — mūlādhāra at the base, svādhiṣṭhāna, maṇipūra, anāhata at the heart, viśuddhi at the throat, ājñā between the brows — are the standard furniture of the yoga of the subtle body as it is set out in tantric handbooks, and the sahasrāra is characteristically not counted among them. It is described as lying at or above the crown of the head, and the descriptive tradition, of which Pūrṇānanda's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa is the best known representative, pictures it as a lotus hanging downward with its face turned toward the earth. Everything the hymn has said about the six wheels has been said of places inside the body; the seventh place is where that geography runs out. The order in which the sahasrāra is reached is worth noticing too. This hymn has been ascending, base to crown, which is the order of yoga; other treatments descend from the crown, which is the order of emanation.

Sarvavarṇopaśobhitā is the pivot of the verse, and it turns on a word that means two things at once. Varṇa is colour, and it is also a letter of the alphabet — the term Sanskrit grammar actually uses for a speech-sound. Read the first way, the name says that where each of the six goddesses had one colour (dark, red, yellow, white), she at the crown has all of them. Read the second way, it points at the thousand petals themselves. The descriptive literature explains the thousand as the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, from a to kṣa, repeated twenty times over the petals, so that the lotus is a diagram of the entire stock of articulate sound. The fifty letters as a divine collective are the mātṛkā, the little mothers, and the doctrine that the phonemes are the substance from which the world is assembled is one of the load-bearing ideas of this literature. On that reading the name is not decorative at all: she is adorned by all the letters because the petals are the letters.

Sarvāyudhadharā works the same reversal on the armament. The preceding stanzas each hand their goddess a definite weapon and then hedge — the skull-topped staff and the rest, the thunderbolt and the rest, the trident and the rest, the goad and the rest, every one of them with the Sanskrit ādi trailing behind it. The list was already admitting that it was partial. Here the hedge is dropped and the whole arsenal is simply given at once.

Śuklasaṃsthitā belongs to a scheme the hymn has been running quietly underneath the visible one. Classical Indian medicine describes the body as a sequence of seven dhātus, tissues refined out of one another in order, ending in śukra, the generative fluid, which is the last and most concentrated distillation. The hymn's own series across the six preceding stanzas is skin, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow — six of the seven, in order, though it begins with skin where the medical texts begin with rasa, the nutrient fluid. The seventh place in the series falls here, and śukla is its name. Some read the word not as the tissue but in its plain adjectival sense of white or bright, and take the name to mean that she is established in pure light, which suits the crown; the two readings are not in competition, and commentators tend to keep both.

Sarvatomukhī has a long pedigree outside this hymn. The Puruṣasūkta's cosmic person has a thousand heads and a thousand eyes; the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad and the Bhagavadgītā both describe the one being as having hands, feet, eyes and faces on every side. The word is also used of fire, whose flames go outward in all directions, and it carries in ordinary Sanskrit the sense of complete or all-embracing. The devotional inference is drawn plainly by the tradition and needs no elaboration: if she faces every direction, no worshipper is ever standing behind her.

This verse and the one that follows it are usually chanted as a single unit, because the seventh cakra stanza does not finish until yākinyambāsvarūpiṇī. Reciters who stop at sarvatomukhī leave the description hanging without its goddess. In the sequential worship where each name is offered separately, the datives are sahasradalapadmasthāyai, sarvavarṇopaśobhitāyai, sarvāyudhadharāyai, śuklasaṃsthitāyai — the ordinary -āyai of feminine ā-stems — but sarvatomukhī is an ī-stem and gives sarvatomukhyai, with the ī contracting to y before the ending. That one break in the pattern is where the ending is most often got wrong.

The first line is hard for reasons of consonant clusters rather than length. Sahasradalapadmasthā has dma, a dental d released into a labial m, and then sthā, a dental s followed by an aspirated dental th. Neither will survive being hurried. Say pad-ma with the d actually pronounced and not assimilated into the m, and let sthā take its full aspiration. In the second name, varṇo has a retroflex ṇ — the tongue curled back to the roof of the mouth — and it is retroflex because of the r that precedes it, which is worth knowing because the same change will show up in svarūpiṇī in the next verse. The o of varṇo is a junction: varṇa plus upaśobhitā, a short a meeting a short u, which in Sanskrit gives o.

In the second line, śukla begins with the palatal ś, made further forward than English sh, and follows it with kla, which English speakers tend to break with a vowel. Keep it as one release. Saṃsthitā puts an anusvāra in front of the sth cluster: the nasal is held, then the cluster is articulated cleanly, saṃ-sthi-tā, three distinct beats. Sarvatomukhī ends on a long ī, and the final long vowel of a pāda tends to get clipped when a reciter is already thinking about the next line.

As to what the verse asks: it is the terminus of a practice that has been moving upward through the body, and the whole ascent is meant to be visualised in order, wheel by wheel, before the crown is reached. Practitioners who place the mantra on the body before recitation will have already touched these locations. The particular discipline of this stanza is that it withholds a fixed image. Every earlier station could be pictured — a colour, a face, a weapon in a hand. Here the colour is all colours, the faces are in every direction, the hands hold everything there is. There is nothing left that the visual imagination can pin down, and the tradition treats that failure of the image as the point rather than as a defect in the description.